Lesson: How to Get Press with Ari Dyckovsky & Catalin Voss

Step #4 Timing: Find out when is the best time for your startup to get press

Catalin: The time to reach out to the press is if you have a reason to reach out to the press. Two things need to come together. The first one is you need to have news to tell, but you can sometimes construct news. Though that makes it harder, it is better if you have news to tell.

The second is you have a goal for why you want PR. You have a goal for who you want to talk to and what you want to achieve and getting to them and PR is a means to get to them. At that stage you will know. There are multiple times for that. If you found product market fit and your product works and now it's about reaching more customers, that's an excellent time to do PR.

If you’ve raised a round and you are looking to hire more people and ramp up your effort, then that's an excellent time to do PR, probably with a journal that you think the people you would like to hire would be reading. Typically, it's a good idea to hit something out with a customer lined up to back up the story and say, "Yeah, we actually have a commercial use case for this,” especially if you are talking about an enterprise product.

Ari: The optimum time for reaching out to the press, for us right now after the one about us leaving Stanford and starting our company, is probably going to be the next time we can tell them we have something to show. When we have probably a beta product, we are going to reach out to the press and do a piece on what our technology actually is and what it looks like.